Annual Confidential Reports – Can't the Reviewing officer change the grading?
Annual Confidential Report is a weapon in the hands of senior officers to control their subordinates. Also to shower favours on subservient subordinates. A government servant's altitudinal ladder is filled with the steps of the ACRs . There is a reporting officer and a reviewing officer who study the work of the subordinates and report on their performance and grade them from ‘excellent' to ‘poor'. Any adverse report is communicated to the employee who can submit his explanation and the reports are again reviewed. But in both the Revenue Boards, the reporting and reviewing system is in shambles. With frequent transfers of officers and with no respect for time frame, these reports and reviews are not written on time nor reviewed with the result that at the time of promotion/deputation, many officers find that their ACRs are not up to date and they run from Pillai to Patel to get the ACRs written and most often some of the reporting or reviewing officers must have retired. The CBEC website has a list of pendency of ACRs of officers as on 30.09.2005, which prominently includes the senior most officers of the Department. After 2005, they have also not updated the list.
Now there is a question. Can the reviewing officer change the grade awarded by a reporting officer if he has expunged the remarks of the Reporting officers? The answer should obviously be YES, because the expunging does not serve any purpose if the grading is not changed. But there is a view that the reviewing officer cannot change the grading. Then there is no purpose in review at all. Suppose a reporting officer states that the subordinate does not understand the Central Excise Rules and so grades him as ‘poor' and the reviewing officer finds that this was the officer who drafted the Central Excise Rules and it was the Reporting Officer and not the Reported Officer who did not understand the Rules; can't he change the grading?